We share the pathologies of all dying empires with their mixture of buffoonery, rampant corruption, military fiascos, economic collapse and savage state repression.
"The more dysfunctional the state becomes, the more it creates a business opportunity for predatory corporations and private equity firms. These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire."
For me, this is key. In Kennard's earlier book, "Silent Coup", he and co-author Claire Provost share some bone-jarring investigations of how countries cede their sovereignty to corporate behemoths, with resulting deep lesions to both economic and sociopolitical health. Many Americans seem oblivious to the extent that this same cancer has consumed their own country, but to anyone paying attention, the situation is as dire as Chris makes it out to be.
Thanks, I'll check it out. I was going to respond to your comment from Anton Chigurh, that it's such an apropos response to this duopoly BS and that I can picture Javier Bardem saying it in that dismissive way he does so well.
Lest we forget it was Joe Biden, Blinken, General Austin, Linda Greenfield-Thomas and their whole retinue who paved the way with 2,000 pound bombs and merciless slaughter for Trump and Netanyahu to claim Gaza as real estate. Now that the seemingly mad Trump is in power people seem to be forgetting who put him there. People couldn't stomach Genocide Joe, Bloodthirsty Blinken or the erasure of women's safety spaces, which led millions to avoid voting or to vote for impossible candidates. The dems could have run Sanders or Warren to give voters some choice, but instead they preferred to stick with the genocideers. This isn’t just the product of the fulminating corrupt Trump, it's also consequence of the corrupt credit card Senator Biden and his entourage who never saw a war he didn't like . He's the one who gave billions to Israeli to slaughter the Palestinians so now the next in line is reaping the whirlwind.
Do you really think it matters how we vote, when the tech bros will tell us what the computers say we voted for? Do you think they'd leave that to chance?
Actually Trump won, then lost, then won. He never claimed the machines were rigged when he won. Maybe the tech bros don't give a fuck since they own both parties. Beside that, the "tech bros" can't do a damn thing if the people insist on counted paper ballots. That's how it's done in Vermont. The problem does not really seem to be the voting machines, I would say the problem is that there is not a viable opposition party to the war machine.
Wake up, do some chores, work, and read on sub-stack how the end times are upon us. I don't remember this apocalyptic rhetoric being spun during the Biden years, no matter the carnage he implemented in Ukraine, and Gaza. Less we forget Trump is reviving Biden's proposal to remove Palestinians from Gaza, and put them in the hands of other Arab states like Egypt. Curious Trump is trying to repeat what Biden tried to implement but failed, and i think he also knows that these Arab countries will not take on this problem. I would rather take a wait and see attitude as to what is to happen next. I was hoping the rhetoric so prevalent during Trump's first 4 years in office would subside. I'm braced for the perpetual rants of friends and relatives who will proclaim he will be the death of us all. However, this does not mean that his policies should not be critically evaluated, and hopefully by people without a deep seated perception of him as the incarnation of evil.
Actually, Chris Hedges has been lecturing and writing about this terrifying descent for MANY years and he continued right on during genocide joe's tenure. Chris' has equally withering appraisals of both main political parties and this too has been the case for many years. I encourage you to google his name.
I've been reading Chris for many years now, but, when I attempted to share his views with those who claim to be on the left (whatever that used to mean) I was refused, ignored and attacked - they had zero interest in his words. The only time the former left sees how awful it all is is when a Republican occupies Whiteys House. We have Trump because the Democrats are and have been horrible all along - now we get to really experience horror - thank you to the Dismal D's.
The dems also "care" about human rights when a dem is in office--they care about everyone's rights as long as no one needs those rights such as protesters and Palestinians and undocumented migrants and poor people. I used to say the exact same thing about the dems at least pretending to care, but I've come to believe, particularly since the genocide began, that their pretending to care has not only allowed, but hastened, the us fall into whatever hell we're now free-falling into. We the people have kept placing our bets on the dems who continue selling us to the highest bidder and clutching their pearls while they shake their policy papers in the faces of those wielding metaphorical and literal nukes.
Yeah, but when he has Trump in his sights he sounds like he's lecturing from the bloody pulpit. I want more objectivity since his hatred of the man is all too self evident, and for me diminishes his credibility, like calling or comparing him to Hitler in the previous post.
Honestly if you read him over the long haul, Hedges has been as eloquently critical of the D's. Look at what happened on the D's watch-continuance of Guantanamo Bay. Snowden. Assange. A general favoring of censorship in lieu of proposing better ideas, which they cannot BECAUSE they are beholden to the same interests. Engaging in/continuing stupid wars of choice not to mention genocide in Gaza entirely underwritten by the US and legitimized by our support. The duopoly is very much part of why we are here and Hedges has said that over and over.
Yes, the crumbling empire, and I don't disagree we may bring about our own demise However Hedges does have a highly bias attitude toward Trump, and I'm not saying he's not entitled to hate him if he chooses, but when I read his posts, or listen to his dialogue about the man I don't want him to reference him as Hitler which he did recently. I need objectivity, and that's all I ask. During Trump's time in office people spewed hate at each other, and although I didn't vote for him in 2016, and didn't vote for Clinton, a war monger, I made him win according to some. I took a lot of abuse. During those 4 years people were at each other's throats. Someone on Facebook told me to kill myself, simply because I tried to see things objectively and refused to get on the hate Trump bandwagon. I didn't think he suggested people drink Clorox, yet because I thought that someone told me in no uncertain terms I should kill myself. Drink the bleach and kill yourself, they said. So I played the game and told her I feel she threatened by life and I will have to report her to Facebook. Well, she got herself off and everything she had in print and she did it so quickly it was mind boggling. The press and the so called left wing stirred up people's hate and lost all sense of journalistic integrity in the process. I just hope we don't have a repeat of that.
I understand. I first read about Trump in David Cay Johnston's books and then Johnston also wrote a book about Trump when he ran for office the first time. I have always found him to be a con man and a grifter and the first term did nothing to change my mind about that. He has historically cheated so many workers of rightful wages. So when Chris Hedges writes about, "billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants" I think at least three terms describe Trump. And yes, to your larger point, way back to Clinton at least, we've been caught between the devil and the deep blue sea and the whole "lesser of two evils" conversation is proof positive that even Dems know this. Again for those of us reading and following Hedges for more than a decade, he has never, ever championed a democratic candidate. He supported Ralph Nader in his run. And yes, I have been more open about the fact that I simply could not in good conscience vote for Harris, than in past years and when people tell me I caused the mess I just remind them that I am not obligated to vote for any candidate; it is rather their job to persuade me and they failed to make the case.
But Hedges has been inside of countries he's reported from when the government falls and he knows it brings suffering, violence and uncertainty, and I think his distress over that is reflected in this essay. And frankly none of us are looking forward to it.
I read American Fascists many years ago, when it first appeared, and ever since it has lingered in my mind, with its prophetic analysis coming more clearly into view. with the passage of years. We're witnessing a destructive madness that will almost certainly precipitate an orgy of domestic violence. As Trump and his minions break things and make every social problem much worse, they will become more and more unhinged, blaming everyone but themselves. We will be pitted against each other. Our institutions cannot save us because they have become too corrupted. Magical thinking will continue to prevail.
Only partial salvation would be small communities as created by for example mutual aid groups; but this would be on a fairly small basis. I'd sadly have to agree that disruption of magical thinking is a tall order.
Indeed. The critics hated them as anti-social enclaves. What they couldn't see was the validity of the aversion to the society that drove folks to look for those alternatives. Turn on, tune in, drop out.
I think that this is a very germane subject. The viable aspects of the alternative living possibilities of the counter culture, those documented so well by the Stewart Brand/Whole Earth/Co-Evolution Quarterly crew - were pretty much washed away by the tsunami of Reaganism/neoliberalism. (I remember when the Appropriate Technology co-discipline department at the University of Washington simply disappeared in the late 70s).
The burgeoning.experiments that were taking place: systems of regional economy including alternative currencies and barter, viable and (genuinely environmentally) sustainable agricultural and technology, with a small community emphasis.
It seems that most intentional communities ultimately disintegrate. Some critical mass of numbers and wider culture is lacking, as they often form around a specific foundation of charismatic leader or ideology.
But I think that some form of communities based on them, within the context of an overall sociopolitical entity is possible. Even within the scenario that is likely coming here in the U.S.
Ironically, it is the survivalist Right that seems to be most actively forming entities roughly of this nature. Bunkers for Billionaires and the white nationalist/militia redoubts in places like upstate Idaho : a very Manichaean form. (And again, ironically, about the only knowledge of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly et.al. is the fact that they foresaw the transformation that would be possible with digital technology before anyone else. The Tech Bros: "Oh yeah, that Stewart Brand, guy. He saw it." But they totally missed the context of values, and more to the point, ignore Jaron Lanier and his warnings, who, if anyone, was one of the few, true geniuses of that age of transformation.)
But, I think it is in fact possible that certain areas could draw people who have in mind living locally along the lines of regional communities based on the principles first proposed by the earlier counterculture, along the lines of different values.
The technology now, those for electrical power, for example, are so much better than the nascent forms in the 70s.
I think that it would just have to arise spontaneously, but I believe it is possible.
...
Tangentially, an article in GQ of all things appeared on my browser opening promo window this week. Sad nostalgia, remembering some of those same buildings, recalled from the old book Shelter. But nice to see that a few people stayed true and held onto the possibility, and made it until now. A certain empirical proof of a degree of viability.
You make some great points. Hopefully, the billionaire enclaves won't be the sole surviving manifestation of this communal energy. Thanks for the links -- although I try hard to avoid the nostalgia; hard enough to live in the present.
The nostalgia was accidental, just felt it when I looked at the article. (You might know: at the origin of nostalgia as a concept, by Johannes Hofer, 1688, it was considered it a psychological disorder.)
To be honest I always had mixed feelings about the counterculture, as I do with with any ideologically-based group. To be honest, with any group. Period. There is always a mix of what I think they get right, and what they get wrong. But that movement did get an awful lot right, directions which if they had been pursued might have made a considerable difference in where are today, in material culture, environmentally sound infrastructure, again, all coming from a different set of values. You don't even hear the the term "materialism" anymore, because it has won out, slaying all others. It used to be one of a variety of values and social institutions, others that tempered it. We now all swim in a sea of it. Market capital world: everything is a product, a commodity. And no one thinks it odd.
As for the chance of people taking a cue from that time, I'm not hopeful. I just don't see the necessary preconditions for it in the culture now. But things will definitely change in the next years, like the 1930s, the economic crisis will bust things open, and apart, and just plain bust them. And this will leave open other directions.
"These Christian fascists, who define the core ideology of the Trump administration . . . "
Really?
1) Trump is not very Christian
2) Musk is not very Christian
3) David Sacks is not very Christian
4) RFK Jr. is not very Christian
5) Gabbard is not very Christian
6) Patel is not very Christian
Okay, Vance, Hegseth, and Bannon put on at least a show of being "quite Christian," but to say that "Christian fascism defines the core ideology of the Trump administration" is just ridiculous. It's just one of several competing ideological sects.
Everyone in the comments going into one about whether Trump is a Christian or a Zionist, about who voted for the Democrats, about who's fault Gaza is, about whether voting counts at all.
Do we think the climate crisis carers who's fault it is? Does it care who it kills first (though it will be the most vulnerable).
The idiots who have voted for him 3 times now generally identify as Christians. The people who took away the freedom of 50% of Americans (women) identify as Christians.
Just to let you know I do believe in a woman's right to choose, however as a woman I was appalled by the death inflicted on children by the Biden administration's decision to support Israel's genocide. It gave Israel the bombs that killed mostly children and women. It was especially disturbing to see women clutching their dead babies, rocking them sometimes, as if they could comfort them in death. We let them cut off food to these children and medical supplies to help heal their wounds. Perhaps you are unaware that Biden was chair of the Foreign relations comm. and pushed all our Middle Eastern wars, and I wonder how many millions of children and women were killed in those lying wars? Are you one of those idiots that voted for Bush/Cheney, Obama, Biden?
Not to mention his lack of character in his personal life which always bothered me. When his wife was killed in an auto accident he made up the story it wasn't her fault, but it was. She unfortunately drove into the oncoming traffic and almost killed the man who hit her, since his vehicle tumbled over and over, but he got out and came to her assistance. Biden even lied, and claimed he was drinking. He also had to step down from a presidential run in the 1980's because he stole other people's speeches. Obama got it right when he said one should never underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up.
I don't think so Kathleen, I get depressed just reading about it every now and again. However, it shouldn't be surprising that it turned out like this given our ancestors, those cute, but often violent chimps, morphed into us.
Fran, I'm not proud of voting for Kamala/Cheney. Voting for either candidate was a very morally compromising thing to do, since they were just 2 aspects of 1 insane military-industrial corporate empire. I voted for Kamala because the left is so divided right now that we have zero revolution ready to roll, and I thought, how dare I DRAFT the most marginalized Americans to be the cannon fodder, the first to suffer (and suffer greatly!) for my half-baked dream revolution? Have you even thought about this?
Also, while ALL American presidents in my 71-year life have been war criminals (part of the job description, don't you know), Trump was different. He had already murdered 400,000 elderly Americans (says The Lancet, world famous journalist Carl Bernstein (who broke the Watergate story and the Mai Lai story), and Trump's own Director of Vaccines, Dr. Tony Bright).
People make the assertion that Trump's mishandling of Covid caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths due to Covid, and even reference it as, he murdered these people. However, let me remind you that there were, and still are hundreds of thousands of deaths in hospitals and nursing homes yearly due to unsanitary conditions, or simply poor care which was in play before the Covid pandemic and after. That was never taken into account. Those Aides who took over the role once implemented by the nursing staff really don't implement decent hygienic care at all. Our health care system is a mess. That's why they suggest if you're going to have a hospital stay, have an advocate. During the Trump years he was blamed for everything, and anything and that's how a riot became an insurrection, and Liz Cheney got her presidential citizens medal from Biden. We can't go back to those years. I use to be a registered democrat and cut loose when the man I supported, Sanders, sang Clinton's praises when she won the democratic primary in 2016, a war monger who supported all our Middle Eastern wars and laughed when she heard Gaddafi died, and died because of the lies the democrats, and Clinton provided.
Well, that's just how "party loyalty" works, you support the new leader, even though Sanders knew the DNC was rigged against him since they never bothered to finish the CA primary vote. The joke of a constitution only (barely) functions when participants are people with good intent. That is so over.
Absolutely right. At the time I would occasionally watch MSNBC and they referenced him as the old curmudgeon, and they work hand and glove with the democratic party, so they know it wanted a Clinton win. You hope against hope.
Fran, there is no point in trying to get through to a Trumper. Taiwan and Florida have the same size population: 23M. In rowboat distance from China, Taiwan had zero time to prepare for Covid. America had 2 months to prepare. Trump's criminal negligence during that time resulted, in Florida alone, in 24,000 Covid deaths during his term. In Taiwan, which had plenty of PPE and almost instantly had rolled out fast testing, which allowed contact tracing (do you know what that is?), there was little societal disruption and only 7 deaths during Trump's term. Ever heard of The Lancet (the world's most respected medical journal)?? Bye Karen.
How does anyone evaluate his performance during the Covid pandemic, or anything else when the mainstream media lost all sense of objectivity during his presidency as did the left. The riot at the Capital became an insurrection, instead of a riot, which it was, and of course there was the lie of Russia-gate, but it was predicated on a lie, but no one was held accountable. How can you trust the media to evaluate his performance during the Covid pandemic when they were willing to lie and distort truth every which way they could when it came to Trump. I don't know whether I addressed you yesterday on this issue and wrote about our health care system, so maybe this is a repeat. Do you know, or are aware of the fact that some hundred thousand people who enter hospitals die every year due to infections? Infections that kill more people every year then auto-accidents, and Aids and breast cancer, etc. combined. Do you know why? Bad hygiene! Multiply all that a number of times when one is talking about nursing homes. Poor hygiene is the main reason that makes the elderly much more likely to contract pneumonia and die. Bedsores kill them, sepsis kills them. Poor hygiene is a matter of course. How do you evaluate how many people died of Covid under Trump's watch when what it did was just add fuel to the fire.
Trump SHOULD be blamed for everything because he was the captain of a ship who PURPOSELY navigated into a shipwreck. You heard the tape of him telling famous journalist Bob Woodward that he knew Covid was an airborne plague, yet he did nothing for the crucial first 2 months. Taiwan had 7 deaths during Trump's presidency while Florida, with the same population had 24,000. I will not discuss this with someone who is ignorant of the basic concept of the scientific method. Read the truth in The Lancet, the most respected medical journal in the world: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/02/11/trumps-policies-resulted-in-the-unnecessary-deaths-of-hundreds-of-thousands-of-americans-lancet-report/
I finally read your highly touted article and to me it's representative of the attitude adopted by many which is, let's use Trump as a scapegoat and what ever goes wrong it's his fault. How about some outrage that this was a lab leak and many scientists are against gain of function research for just that reason. I'm sure there's plenty of blame to go around, but lets not continue to use Trump as our whipping boy. Remember the Lancet, and true of other scientific publications. can become highly political which often skews the truth.
Hardly, since my background is in the biological sciences and I also have a degree in nursing.. My mother who was paralyzed from a stoke had to go into a nursing home and I was with her most days for several years until her death. So I have quite a bit of hands on experience on this topic as well, Believe what you want, and yes Trump through his four years in office and during the pandemic was scapegoated by the democrats. I don't care what the Lancet says. Why harp on this Jeff. I am not telling you what your perspective should be just disagreeing with it.
The suffering people you (and the D party elite) so cavalierly dismiss as "idiots," the majority working class, were abandoned after the neolib takeover of the D party. Four decades of not so benign neglect.
We dumb blue collar workers are well aware the Ds did FOR the suffering unemployed workers of the Rust Belt/Appalachia same as they did TO the Wall St. vultures who caused the '08 crash--NOTHING! Same area that not coincidentally now leads in what are called 'deaths of despair." But who cares about these losers, right?
Rather than use a meaningless generalization as simply another condemnation, how about asking WHY people are, say, right wing evangelicals? If there is no chance for decent employment, then TV preachers offering the Gospel of Prosperity start to sound good. If there is no security or meaning in this life, then the only thing left is to aim for the next life. Politicians who align with those slim hopes at least are offering something.
When 65% of Americans have less than $5k savings, 48% have less than $1k, and 28% have no savings at all, then any unanticipated problem easily becomes disaster in just a few weeks. Climate crises, the breakdown of American empire, and terminal capitalism in comparison are abstract, huge, and overwhelming to people already at their limits of anxiety and depression.
‘Christian fascism’ is merely a form of authoritarianism whose adherents channel the simple good/bad rules-based ethos of Christianity - the Ten Commandments in particular - without embracing the religion as a whole. Anyone can do it. Immediately.
So to say some of its adherents are ‘not very Christian’ is to completely miss the point.
We talk, talk about Christianity in regard to this issue but not a word about Judaism, and it's beliefs that for too many justify this carnage in Gaza?
I should have qualified that, you're right, but growing up in a state with many Jews and having Jewish friends all my life, I don't need a lecture from you that suggests my statement reflected an underlying prejudice Gee, only 1 good Jewish friend?
Christian dominionists and Zionists walk hand in hand - particularly when it comes to the ‘true believers’ (rather than the rank and file cynics in these movements.) The Dominionists believe that the unification of Israel will usher in the 2nd coming and then the rapture - and have been working for three generations to bring this about.
Those would be the ‘Jewish fascists’, Zionists or not. There are certainly plenty of them around only it’s a little tricky at the moment for anyone of note to refer to them publicly in such terms.
But that only confirms the fascist nature of their ideology.
Like Christianity and Islam Judaism is not a homologous congregation. Amongst its members - especially in Israel - there are those for whom authority and the qualities that flow from it - oppression of minorities, exceptionalism, mythology, sense of being disrespected (antisemitism), propaganda over truthfulness, cultishness etc - is the essence and must be pushed for their own sake. A special liturgy and ideology of aggression is developed which the leaders assert and to which the followers submit. This then sucks in anyone who is there just to ‘kick ass ‘ which here means those Christians - real or feigned - who create a narrative to justify their allegiance (Second Coming).
As I see it there are effectively two Gods; the one that naturally transcends all consciousness and the one that Man created to ‘bless’ his dominion over everything. The religious fascists - of all denominations - are in the second category.
I am trying to sort out in my mind (and limited understanding) where the Haredim would fit in terms of your schema of the two Gods. By the tenets of their sect, and their lifestyle (and in being anti-Zionist), they would seem to be devoted to the transcendent God. And yet in their actions they seem to be strongly in the second category. A type of selective renunciation of the world(?).
There was a Chabad House near my rooming house near the University of Washington, back in 1970s. I always admired their devotion. (The lights were always burning, from their studying.) It's disappointing to see their actions in the West Bank.
You're so right. I'm afraid there are no real Christians among any listed above. And Christian Fascism is a complete perversion of what Jesus Christ taught. "Christian" fascism is a political ideological sect as you say, not a religion. We only have to read the Beatitudes to know what is Christian and what is not. As soon as a political power structure takes over a religion, religion - as in the carrier of the sacred, or we might say of the Good, the True and the Beautiful - is completely twisted and adulterated. Christian Nationalism or Christian Fascism could more Rightly be called the Antichrist.
Yes, thank you for bringing that in - the more active form (verb) as in living our faith. As a noun it's sometimes more about holding beliefs, having faith in something or someone.
It seems to me that all of them in Trump’s circle are “Christians” in the pretend sense. But that holds true for all the “Christians” in the country that support fascism. They are fascists first and foremost and use their “Christianity” to rally around. From that standpoint Hedge’s correctly refers to all of them as “Christians.”
You forgot to mention the Kushner crime family. Son-in-law Jared prepared the way for Netanyahu and Biden's genocide by initiating the Abraham Accords to tie the other Arab countries hands and keep them from interfering as the genocide progressed. So now ex-con Daddy Charles Kushner is rewarded with a cushy prestigious post as Ambassador to France.
Because I read Hedges' "When Atheism Becomes Religion," I agree with you that these particular figures don't necessarily represent any mainstream religion but the most cultish, radical, Utopian and psycho expressions of religion which can also be expressed existentially. Case in point is the totalitarian "religion of salvation" of scientism which late French political philosopher Tzvetan Todolov describes in "Hope and Memory":
"Totalitarian doctrines are instances of utopianism (the only known instances in the 20th century) and, by the same tolken, variants of millenarism— and that means that they belong, as do all doctrines of salvation, to the field of religion… All the same, the origins of totalitarian utopianism are quite paradoxical for a religion. They lie in a doctrine that was developed before the rise of totalitarian states, before the twentieth century, and which seems at first glance to have absolutely nothing on common with religion. We must turn now to this earlier ideology, which we shall call 'scientism.'
Scientism as a doctrine starts with the hypothesis that the real world is an entirely coherent structure. It follows that the world is transparent, that it can be known entirely and without residue by the human mind. The task of acquiring such knowledge is delegated to the requisite praxis, called science. The basic postulate has one obvious consequence … [I]f the transparency of the real includes the human world, then there is nothing to stop us from imagining how to create the “new man,” a human species without the blemishes of the original strain. The logic of livestock breeding ought to work for humankind as well…
The notion that social and individual ideals are the products of science has another important consequence… There is no room for more than one version of scientific truth; errors are many but the truth is one, and so pluralism becomes an irrelevant concept. If the ideal is a result of demonstration and not of opinion, then it has to be accepted without protest.
Scientism derives from the existence of scientific practice, but it is not itself scientific. It’s basic postulate—the complete transparency of the real—cannot be proved; the same is true of its implementation through the construction of ultimate ends through the process of knowledge. From start to finish, the cult of science requires an act of faith (“faith in reason,” in Ernest Renan’s phrase), which is why it belongs not to the family of sciences, but to the family of religions…
It has to be emphasized that scientism is not a science, but a world view that grew, fungus-like, on the trunk of science. That is why totalitarian systems can embrace the cult of science and still not foster the development of scientific research…
The monism of totalitarian regimes comes from the same axiom of the cult of science. Because there is only one rational way of grasping the entire universe, there is no reason to maintain artificial distinctions between different social groups, between the different spheres of individual life (public and private), and between opinions. Truth is one and so should the human world be. "
"Scientism derives from the existence of scientific practice, but it is not itself scientific. It’s basic postulate—the complete transparency of the real—cannot be proved; the same is true of its implementation through the construction of ultimate ends through the process of knowledge. From start to finish, the cult of science requires an act of faith (“faith in reason,” in Ernest Renan’s phrase), which is why it belongs not to the family of sciences, but to the family of religions…"
........
It reflects something that I have carried in mind for many years, the thought that legitimation of what he terms scientism rests upon an assumption, and is an act of (blind) faith on the same order as that of religion. This being the very criticism that scientism uses to assert it's distinction from them and it's sole legitimacy.
And this never seems to be questioned.
Perhaps discussed elsewhere, but it is the first time I have seen it.
Sorry for the typo-- the quote is from Tzvetan Todorov (not Todolov).
I first learned of Todorov because Hedges' cites his work in When Atheism Becomes Religion. Hedges also quotes Reinhold Niebuhr, another rabbit hole that I followed. I don't necessarily agree with everything written by Niebuhr (apparently the original author of the Serenity Prayer) but he gives a clear warning in The Irony of American History and in The Children of Darkness and the Children of Light. He argues that, when the state and science attempt to answer the human need for transcendence, this invariably leads to the use of power without scruples under an illusion that a particular “conception of an unambiguously ideal end” justifies such abuse: “As politics deals with the proximate ends of life, and religion deals with ultimate ones, it is always a source of illusion when the one is invested with the other…This unification is spurious and dangerous; but this in fact adds to, rather than detracts from, its striking power. Religion and science are combined in such a way that the modern cult of science is brought completely into the service of an existential faith.”
The root theory in totalitarian scientism is arguably the existence of a morally transcendant master race which, on the flipside, naturally requires a kind of morally inferior devil class for contrast. Hannah Arendt also warns about scientism in Totalitarianism, particularly her reference to the core totalitarian concept of the "objective enemy"-- one you don't even need to observe committing any offense much less trying and convicting them because they are, in a sense, "born evil."
If you like a good scare, check out the MacArthur Foundation's Law and Neuroscience project which has been accused of trying to launch a Minority Report style campaign to find the "crime gene." If you go down that particular rabbit hole, some of the research promoted by the project is founded on a terrifying collection of old timey racist theories.
Karl Popper also gets into it in The Open Society and its Enemies regarding Plato's weird Pythagorean theorem supporting the existence of a mater race.
Reading that, I think there is possible way of considering the theory of totalitarian scientism, the MacArthur Foundation project, and Plato's theorem (as described by Propper) above: a sort of root of the root view.
Humans putatively have a capacity for abstract thought that distinguishes us. And we see this ideational capacity this "world of the mind" as existing both above and distinct from the more "primitive" or animal aspects of our nature. We have a high regard for our distinct ability to "reason".
But if we look at the world, it would seem more likely that the abstract thoughts come after the fact of our emotions, the "primitive" foundations of mind.
Leaving aside the problematic and probably unanswerable question of the origins of consciousness, and the nature of the interrelationship of mind and brain, we can limit it to looking at our behavior, and hold certain considerations up against what we see (in history and in the world).
We can hold up the possibility that "us versus them" is a foundational structure that underlies, and shapes our abstract ideations and all that follow (respective to the religious, scientific or philosophical question).
No matter how apparently brilliant the thoughts (by the measure of complexity, subtlety and insight), Platonic theories, science-based study of genetic dispositions, philosophical and religious development of ideas, all ultimately rest upon and are shaped by the pre-verbal levels of mind, and come after the fact, and the ends of these processes reflecting them.
And those pre-verbal levels are in many ways murderous.
I think you're right that humans are primitively prone to analogize everything to the threat of infectious disease, the ultimate unseen enemy. According to Noam Chomsky, there's nothing more dangerous than comparing political problems and ideological enemies to disease. He felt that, in Kissinger’s analysis, a politically contagious threat is the development of independent nationalism in other countries that somehow presents either ideological or economic competition—or anything else that stands in the way of, as Dr. Chomsky also put it, “securing state power from the domestic population and securing concentrated private power”:
"To borrow Henry Kissinger’s terminology, independent nationalism is a 'virus' that might 'spread contagion.' Kissinger was referring to Salvador Allende’s Chile. The virus was the idea that there might be a parliamentary path towards some kind of socialist democracy. The way to deal with such a threat is to destroy the virus and to inoculate those who might be infected, typically by imposing murderous national security states. That was achieved in the case of Chile, but it is important to recognize that the thinking holds worldwide."
"It was, for example, the reasoning behind the decision to oppose Vietnamese nationalism in the early 1950s and support France’s effort to reconquer its former colony. It was feared that independent Vietnamese nationalism might be a virus that would spread contagion to the surrounding regions, including resource-rich Indonesia. That might even have led Japan — called the 'superdomino' by Asia scholar John Dower — to become the industrial and commercial center of an independent new order of the kind imperial Japan had so recently fought to establish. That, in turn, would have meant that the U.S. had lost the Pacific war, not an option to be considered in 1950. The remedy was clear — and largely achieved. Vietnam was virtually destroyed and ringed by military dictatorships that kept the “virus” from spreading contagion."
Hedges also alludes to a kind of "viral" analogy in Richard Dawkins' "scientism-y" concept of memetic evolution. Maybe because the idea harks to the debunked Lamarckian evolutionary theory that acquired traits are genetic, Sam Harris opined that it's not unreasonable to kill people because of their beliefs alone. For that matter, maybe he'd think it was also acceptable to kill their children in the case these ideas are "inherited" like RNA viruses.
I think that we are prone to seeing everything in terms of certain fundamental underlying structures, or themes, that are at their basis absolutely "primitive". I see genetic influence is itself as having a metaphorical element. (And in many applications, perhaps best left there.) I think that genetics is clearly an undeniable reality, but it is problematic when it is carried to the point that is seen as teleological and even deterministic (as is often done).
I would put it in terms of human dispositions and tendencies, leaving aside the question of a materialist aspect of mind. (Again the relationship between brain and mind, and the nature of consciousness has never been satisfactorily explained, in any discipline.)
With respect to what you write, I would say that the the innate fear of invasive disease, a form of "other", infection, is one of the primary structures (like us and them) upon which our mental activities are built.
It's potency both infects the thoughts of someone like Kissinger (who I'm sure accepted it as face value) and also in combination with "us and them" also had an incredibly effective manipulative power within the context of the political situation of that time, as used by him. The key aspect here is the fact that this process, the structuring of the idea and the influence on the thought of Kissinger and those who are influenced by his ideas is totally unconscious. The don't themselves see the root, but accept that the perception it shapes is reality.
Perhaps this disposition is in fact genetic, but I think that we enter into fraught territory when genetics is viewed to any degree of determinism - it enters into the area that Niebuhr and Chris Hedges discuss in the passage you cited, particularly when taken to the extremes of Harris, Dawkins, the Nazis, the American history of eugenics.
It is blindingly obvious that Trump et al are "not very Christian" even if, like the Curate's egg, they think they are "good in parts". The fact that they do think they are, is, I think, Chris's point. He is clearly writing with deep irony, which may be missed in some quarters - but this is a side issue.
The main point is that Perfection is, after all, not a human characteristic. Despite Trump’s brilliant example, you simply can't be perfectly stupid, clueless, dishonest, or generally crooked. The reason is that you will slip up by accident now and then and say or do things that are not perfectly stupid, clueless, dishonest or generally crooked. Such is the frailty of human nature. Bad people occasionally do good and kindly things by mistake!
It is therefore clear that the appropriate term for all such "Christian" hangers-on is: "Pseudo-Christian". Thus Chris ought to have begun by saying, "The billionaires, Pseudo-Christian fascists, grifters..." etc. and then we would all know what page we are on. Ditto the name of his book.
America has from its inception been a home to umpteen forms of Pseudo-Christianity. It is perhaps the world-leader in a field that ought to be more formally known as, "Pseudo-Christian Fascist Materialism". In what other country can the acquisition of extreme wealth, by fair means or foul, be seen as a form of “Christian” sanctity, or at least a deeply blessèd form of morally superior wisdom, particularly bestowed on those who spell God with an L, as in the case of Joseph Heller’s Major Major Major Major’s father.
Thank you for the Curate's egg. An expression I wasn't familiar with.
And for the mention of anything by Heller. Still tracking down, though, the reference to God spelled with an L (decades have passed since reading the book).
In the process so far, though, I did find this wonderful section, I'd also forgotten this one, and it was nice to read again. And how many of the same currents have been running through this country in contention for nearly a century now?
Has anyone come close to Heller again, in anything close to this vein, particularly recently?
Yes, what's going on in Washington now looks a lot like the oligarchs tearing up the corpse of our country. I don't think we broke in 2003. I think we broke when the Supreme Court stepped in illegally, stopped the count, and handed the presidency to Bush. Remember those secret energy meetings that VP Cheney was having in Spring 2001? Turns out they were dividing up the energy fields of Iraq. The invasion was already in pre-production.
If Elon Must is supposed to be looking for waste, why isn't he trolling the budget of the Pentagon, which famously "loses" trillions of dollars at a time? Probably not brave enough, is my thought.
When empires collapse, their provinces break up and become states. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed after World War One, the British Empire, the German Empire, the Soviet Union, their pieces broke off.
The United states has one saving grace that these other empires didn't have. We are not run from the top down. We are run from the bottom up. Government begins with towns, cities, then counties, then states. If the Federal Government ceases to function, the state government will still be intact. It is self-funded.
This is all very well for states that send more tax dollars to the Fed than receive them. Those will be self-sustaining. States that need huge doles from the Fed to stay afloat -- here's looking at you, all you red states in the middle -- will fall.
At that point, California will take its place as the 6th largest world economy. Our state government will be intact. And the California National Party already has a plan. If you would like to read an example of what government should look like in the 21st century, check out the platform of the California National Party. https://votecnp.org/platform-2022/.
"We are not run from the top down. We are run from the bottom up. Government begins with towns, cities, then counties, then states. If the Federal Government ceases to function, the state government will still be intact."
This has echoes of deTocqueville, but I wonder though, how true this is today.
I honestly don't know either way.
Hopefully it is still the case, at least in the majority of states.
But the realities of seceding from the union...I think that would be a hugely difficult and fraught endeavor. For all of the anti-government talk, the current scenario is one of greater concentration of power, centered on the federal level and in the office held by Donald Trump. It's difficult to envision the Right giving up the prize that they finally seem to have won completely. It would seem that they would be particularly reluctant to lose those states that provide the most federal tax revenue, regardless of the red/blue proportion within those states. And even the bluest contain a red population.
But...in the scenario of a more than likely national economic catastrophe, things could change in ways that are hard to imagine now. I think it is possible.
I am not envisioning a secession movement. I am envisioning the US collapsing (what if Elon Musk has just converted the US Treasury to DOGE coins, his NFT? After all, that's what he called his extra-legal onslaught on the Federal Government), and the states becoming countries because D.C. is no longer capable of controlling anything. I'm envisioning that CA will just step off. No one wants a repeat of the Civil War.
I was editing that first to add that very thing as you were typing. I think that might qualify as an instance of synchronicity.
.....
I didn't get a lot of information from the website, a new organization, the specifics still forming. But I think that it does point to something that is a very, very good idea. Organizations formed specifically to deal with the scenario of the coming troubles. The political equivalent of the disaster plans by the Oregon and Washington state governments to prepare for the Pacific Subduction earthquake.
Organizations from grass-roots to state level to prepare for the likelihood of federal political and economic disaster. Formal organizational structures, particularly on a state level, developed and ready to step in and re-establish function in the setting of federal failure.
The prospect of this possibility makes me more hopeful. Thank you.
I think that one factor that distinguishes the scenario of the U.S. empire from the others you mentioned is that big part of the break-up of the Ottoman, Habsburg and the British empires was coming bottom up from the nationalistic drives within those parts of the empire along the lines ethnic nationalism, the desire for a state defined by and for those groups, the nation-state. A drive starting in the 19th century. A similar nationalistic fervor plays a part in what is happening here, but I think that it plays in a slightly different way, one closer to the Volkisch movement. But in terms of over-all effect, I think that it could be nearly equally de-stabilizing, still leading to fault lines.
I believe that those nationalistic longings were always there, but a strong central government keeps them in check. See how Yugoslavia broke up after Tito.
Yes, which recalls one of the ironies of empires: historically they sometimes succeeded in terms enjoying long periods of peace and stability within, and the differences of ethnicity and religion were tolerated much more readily than in other eras. A trade-off.
Been following you for many years and appreciate your analysis. As you continue your reporting will you be able to suggest ways common citizens in this country might readjust their lifestyle in order to take care of their families or will a decent life for us be unattainable?
Agreed. As I replied to a comment by you previously, those I attempted to share his work with attacked him (and me for sharing his work) but never once mentioned where he specifically "got it wrong" . . . and now here WE are. Faint-hearted, Blue Kool-Aid-aholics, intentionally dismissive of what they do not want to look at - this is why we have Orange idiot.
"The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg ruler, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities."
Caligula and Nero were part of the first Roman imperial dynasty, the Juilo-Claudian dynasty. The Western Empire was just getting started and had another 400 or so years to run when Caligula and Nero were up and about.
Moreover, if Team R were as lockstep as you claim, why the difficulties in getting confirmations? They control both houses of Congress, so confirming a Gabbard or a Patel should be as simple as "here's your marching orders, now start marching!"
Excellent as always! Yesterday unloading books from sagging bookshelves, I discovered "The Rise & Fall of the Roman Empire" published by National Geographic. I'm looking forward to comparing the inept leadership in our declining empire vs. theirs. There will no doubt be many similarities.
You might check out Mike Duncan's History of Rome, a free podcast, which he then published as a book. He's a great scholar, and a terrific story-teller.
That's what I love about Chris, always looking on the bright side! I'm sure we all needed that heavy dose of downers. Thanks so much.
Until the shtf, which apparently, from this article, is 2030, let us do everything we can to slow it down, and maybe get lucky, and bring the destruction to a halt. If we don't think we can, that is a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is exactly the opposite of what we need.
But we have to get active; do more than read and agree, or disagree. If you can't be in the streets, then send your letters, emails, fill out forms, speak out in person, and in comments, such as this one, send money to organizations doing the work of spreading the word, and saving lives, counter the MSM messaging, start, and sign petitions. The list goes on. It really is up to us.
Wait, Chris should focus on the bright side of our new administration tearing up the US Constitution while dismantling our federal apparatus of state? Are there dance moves that go with that song? The shtf already, 2030 is the final curtain call.
I do agree that those of us who don't like what we see should take action, and most of all, we should join with others and take collective action. Also, you left out "boycott." :)
According to McCoy who Hedges references, the 27 year time span started in 2003. So according to the math, it will collapse in 2030. Unless you are in the last few years of your life, you will indeed be around to see it. That is unless nuclear weapons are unleashed upon the earth, climate change gets us, or an economic collapse, or a combination of all of them kills off millions or billions before 2030. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut: And so it goes.
It is so surreal watching from Canada that there is no resistance to Elon Musk executing a coup with no opposition whatsoever. He's got personal and financial information on every American, American industries as well as nuclear contracts, details and probably much, much, more. This article is great in articulating that the US, in terms of empire, is rather pedestrian than exceptional - which, as Canadians, we always suspected. ;-)
"The more dysfunctional the state becomes, the more it creates a business opportunity for predatory corporations and private equity firms. These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire."
For me, this is key. In Kennard's earlier book, "Silent Coup", he and co-author Claire Provost share some bone-jarring investigations of how countries cede their sovereignty to corporate behemoths, with resulting deep lesions to both economic and sociopolitical health. Many Americans seem oblivious to the extent that this same cancer has consumed their own country, but to anyone paying attention, the situation is as dire as Chris makes it out to be.
Ian Welsh's masterpiece addresses this:
https://www.ianwelsh.net/7-rules-for-running-a-real-left-wing-government/
This applies to any government outside the Overton Window.
Thanks, I'll check it out. I was going to respond to your comment from Anton Chigurh, that it's such an apropos response to this duopoly BS and that I can picture Javier Bardem saying it in that dismissive way he does so well.
Thanks for this from Ian Welsh. It's refreshingly direct.
Lest we forget it was Joe Biden, Blinken, General Austin, Linda Greenfield-Thomas and their whole retinue who paved the way with 2,000 pound bombs and merciless slaughter for Trump and Netanyahu to claim Gaza as real estate. Now that the seemingly mad Trump is in power people seem to be forgetting who put him there. People couldn't stomach Genocide Joe, Bloodthirsty Blinken or the erasure of women's safety spaces, which led millions to avoid voting or to vote for impossible candidates. The dems could have run Sanders or Warren to give voters some choice, but instead they preferred to stick with the genocideers. This isn’t just the product of the fulminating corrupt Trump, it's also consequence of the corrupt credit card Senator Biden and his entourage who never saw a war he didn't like . He's the one who gave billions to Israeli to slaughter the Palestinians so now the next in line is reaping the whirlwind.
Do you really think it matters how we vote, when the tech bros will tell us what the computers say we voted for? Do you think they'd leave that to chance?
Actually Trump won, then lost, then won. He never claimed the machines were rigged when he won. Maybe the tech bros don't give a fuck since they own both parties. Beside that, the "tech bros" can't do a damn thing if the people insist on counted paper ballots. That's how it's done in Vermont. The problem does not really seem to be the voting machines, I would say the problem is that there is not a viable opposition party to the war machine.
"If the rule that you followed led you to this, of what use then was the rule?" -Anton Chigurh
Wake up, do some chores, work, and read on sub-stack how the end times are upon us. I don't remember this apocalyptic rhetoric being spun during the Biden years, no matter the carnage he implemented in Ukraine, and Gaza. Less we forget Trump is reviving Biden's proposal to remove Palestinians from Gaza, and put them in the hands of other Arab states like Egypt. Curious Trump is trying to repeat what Biden tried to implement but failed, and i think he also knows that these Arab countries will not take on this problem. I would rather take a wait and see attitude as to what is to happen next. I was hoping the rhetoric so prevalent during Trump's first 4 years in office would subside. I'm braced for the perpetual rants of friends and relatives who will proclaim he will be the death of us all. However, this does not mean that his policies should not be critically evaluated, and hopefully by people without a deep seated perception of him as the incarnation of evil.
Actually, Chris Hedges has been lecturing and writing about this terrifying descent for MANY years and he continued right on during genocide joe's tenure. Chris' has equally withering appraisals of both main political parties and this too has been the case for many years. I encourage you to google his name.
I've been reading Chris for many years now, but, when I attempted to share his views with those who claim to be on the left (whatever that used to mean) I was refused, ignored and attacked - they had zero interest in his words. The only time the former left sees how awful it all is is when a Republican occupies Whiteys House. We have Trump because the Democrats are and have been horrible all along - now we get to really experience horror - thank you to the Dismal D's.
I have little good to say about Team R, but at least Team D pretends to care about human rights when Team R is in the White House.
The dems also "care" about human rights when a dem is in office--they care about everyone's rights as long as no one needs those rights such as protesters and Palestinians and undocumented migrants and poor people. I used to say the exact same thing about the dems at least pretending to care, but I've come to believe, particularly since the genocide began, that their pretending to care has not only allowed, but hastened, the us fall into whatever hell we're now free-falling into. We the people have kept placing our bets on the dems who continue selling us to the highest bidder and clutching their pearls while they shake their policy papers in the faces of those wielding metaphorical and literal nukes.
I haven't placed my bets on Team D. I know the score.
damned with faint praise
It is fear, denial, hubris and indoctrination which cause people to reject what you say. It’s the old “la la la la la, I can’t hear you” tactic.
Yeah, but when he has Trump in his sights he sounds like he's lecturing from the bloody pulpit. I want more objectivity since his hatred of the man is all too self evident, and for me diminishes his credibility, like calling or comparing him to Hitler in the previous post.
Objectivity ? Are you serious ? Do you mean " ............but on the other hand Hitler also built some great highways"
AND, lest we forget, the great cars that ran on them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctin21yrfcA
Ha, ha.
Honestly if you read him over the long haul, Hedges has been as eloquently critical of the D's. Look at what happened on the D's watch-continuance of Guantanamo Bay. Snowden. Assange. A general favoring of censorship in lieu of proposing better ideas, which they cannot BECAUSE they are beholden to the same interests. Engaging in/continuing stupid wars of choice not to mention genocide in Gaza entirely underwritten by the US and legitimized by our support. The duopoly is very much part of why we are here and Hedges has said that over and over.
Yes, the crumbling empire, and I don't disagree we may bring about our own demise However Hedges does have a highly bias attitude toward Trump, and I'm not saying he's not entitled to hate him if he chooses, but when I read his posts, or listen to his dialogue about the man I don't want him to reference him as Hitler which he did recently. I need objectivity, and that's all I ask. During Trump's time in office people spewed hate at each other, and although I didn't vote for him in 2016, and didn't vote for Clinton, a war monger, I made him win according to some. I took a lot of abuse. During those 4 years people were at each other's throats. Someone on Facebook told me to kill myself, simply because I tried to see things objectively and refused to get on the hate Trump bandwagon. I didn't think he suggested people drink Clorox, yet because I thought that someone told me in no uncertain terms I should kill myself. Drink the bleach and kill yourself, they said. So I played the game and told her I feel she threatened by life and I will have to report her to Facebook. Well, she got herself off and everything she had in print and she did it so quickly it was mind boggling. The press and the so called left wing stirred up people's hate and lost all sense of journalistic integrity in the process. I just hope we don't have a repeat of that.
I understand. I first read about Trump in David Cay Johnston's books and then Johnston also wrote a book about Trump when he ran for office the first time. I have always found him to be a con man and a grifter and the first term did nothing to change my mind about that. He has historically cheated so many workers of rightful wages. So when Chris Hedges writes about, "billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants" I think at least three terms describe Trump. And yes, to your larger point, way back to Clinton at least, we've been caught between the devil and the deep blue sea and the whole "lesser of two evils" conversation is proof positive that even Dems know this. Again for those of us reading and following Hedges for more than a decade, he has never, ever championed a democratic candidate. He supported Ralph Nader in his run. And yes, I have been more open about the fact that I simply could not in good conscience vote for Harris, than in past years and when people tell me I caused the mess I just remind them that I am not obligated to vote for any candidate; it is rather their job to persuade me and they failed to make the case.
But Hedges has been inside of countries he's reported from when the government falls and he knows it brings suffering, violence and uncertainty, and I think his distress over that is reflected in this essay. And frankly none of us are looking forward to it.
If the swastika fits….
Born on Jan 6, of this year? Wow and you can write. Amazing, and some years from now you'll be able to think too.
I read American Fascists many years ago, when it first appeared, and ever since it has lingered in my mind, with its prophetic analysis coming more clearly into view. with the passage of years. We're witnessing a destructive madness that will almost certainly precipitate an orgy of domestic violence. As Trump and his minions break things and make every social problem much worse, they will become more and more unhinged, blaming everyone but themselves. We will be pitted against each other. Our institutions cannot save us because they have become too corrupted. Magical thinking will continue to prevail.
Only partial salvation would be small communities as created by for example mutual aid groups; but this would be on a fairly small basis. I'd sadly have to agree that disruption of magical thinking is a tall order.
We formed small communities or self-help groups in the 1960s. They were called hippy communes.
Now you want to do the same thing.
We were right.
Indeed. The critics hated them as anti-social enclaves. What they couldn't see was the validity of the aversion to the society that drove folks to look for those alternatives. Turn on, tune in, drop out.
I think that this is a very germane subject. The viable aspects of the alternative living possibilities of the counter culture, those documented so well by the Stewart Brand/Whole Earth/Co-Evolution Quarterly crew - were pretty much washed away by the tsunami of Reaganism/neoliberalism. (I remember when the Appropriate Technology co-discipline department at the University of Washington simply disappeared in the late 70s).
The burgeoning.experiments that were taking place: systems of regional economy including alternative currencies and barter, viable and (genuinely environmentally) sustainable agricultural and technology, with a small community emphasis.
It seems that most intentional communities ultimately disintegrate. Some critical mass of numbers and wider culture is lacking, as they often form around a specific foundation of charismatic leader or ideology.
But I think that some form of communities based on them, within the context of an overall sociopolitical entity is possible. Even within the scenario that is likely coming here in the U.S.
Ironically, it is the survivalist Right that seems to be most actively forming entities roughly of this nature. Bunkers for Billionaires and the white nationalist/militia redoubts in places like upstate Idaho : a very Manichaean form. (And again, ironically, about the only knowledge of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly et.al. is the fact that they foresaw the transformation that would be possible with digital technology before anyone else. The Tech Bros: "Oh yeah, that Stewart Brand, guy. He saw it." But they totally missed the context of values, and more to the point, ignore Jaron Lanier and his warnings, who, if anyone, was one of the few, true geniuses of that age of transformation.)
But, I think it is in fact possible that certain areas could draw people who have in mind living locally along the lines of regional communities based on the principles first proposed by the earlier counterculture, along the lines of different values.
The technology now, those for electrical power, for example, are so much better than the nascent forms in the 70s.
I think that it would just have to arise spontaneously, but I believe it is possible.
...
Tangentially, an article in GQ of all things appeared on my browser opening promo window this week. Sad nostalgia, remembering some of those same buildings, recalled from the old book Shelter. But nice to see that a few people stayed true and held onto the possibility, and made it until now. A certain empirical proof of a degree of viability.
Apologies for the Amazon link (second) ....
https://www.gq.com/story/californias-vanishing-hippie-utopias
https://www.amazon.com/Shelter-Library-Building-Books/dp/0936070110/144-5741789-0905930?psc=1
You make some great points. Hopefully, the billionaire enclaves won't be the sole surviving manifestation of this communal energy. Thanks for the links -- although I try hard to avoid the nostalgia; hard enough to live in the present.
The nostalgia was accidental, just felt it when I looked at the article. (You might know: at the origin of nostalgia as a concept, by Johannes Hofer, 1688, it was considered it a psychological disorder.)
To be honest I always had mixed feelings about the counterculture, as I do with with any ideologically-based group. To be honest, with any group. Period. There is always a mix of what I think they get right, and what they get wrong. But that movement did get an awful lot right, directions which if they had been pursued might have made a considerable difference in where are today, in material culture, environmentally sound infrastructure, again, all coming from a different set of values. You don't even hear the the term "materialism" anymore, because it has won out, slaying all others. It used to be one of a variety of values and social institutions, others that tempered it. We now all swim in a sea of it. Market capital world: everything is a product, a commodity. And no one thinks it odd.
As for the chance of people taking a cue from that time, I'm not hopeful. I just don't see the necessary preconditions for it in the culture now. But things will definitely change in the next years, like the 1930s, the economic crisis will bust things open, and apart, and just plain bust them. And this will leave open other directions.
excellent article Chris. keep reporting on the mess in Gaza.
Walter
"These Christian fascists, who define the core ideology of the Trump administration . . . "
Really?
1) Trump is not very Christian
2) Musk is not very Christian
3) David Sacks is not very Christian
4) RFK Jr. is not very Christian
5) Gabbard is not very Christian
6) Patel is not very Christian
Okay, Vance, Hegseth, and Bannon put on at least a show of being "quite Christian," but to say that "Christian fascism defines the core ideology of the Trump administration" is just ridiculous. It's just one of several competing ideological sects.
Read the book. You have misread Hedges.
Everyone in the comments going into one about whether Trump is a Christian or a Zionist, about who voted for the Democrats, about who's fault Gaza is, about whether voting counts at all.
Do we think the climate crisis carers who's fault it is? Does it care who it kills first (though it will be the most vulnerable).
The idiots who have voted for him 3 times now generally identify as Christians. The people who took away the freedom of 50% of Americans (women) identify as Christians.
Just to let you know I do believe in a woman's right to choose, however as a woman I was appalled by the death inflicted on children by the Biden administration's decision to support Israel's genocide. It gave Israel the bombs that killed mostly children and women. It was especially disturbing to see women clutching their dead babies, rocking them sometimes, as if they could comfort them in death. We let them cut off food to these children and medical supplies to help heal their wounds. Perhaps you are unaware that Biden was chair of the Foreign relations comm. and pushed all our Middle Eastern wars, and I wonder how many millions of children and women were killed in those lying wars? Are you one of those idiots that voted for Bush/Cheney, Obama, Biden?
Yes, since JFK, all puppets of the system, every one of them. And Biden, like one commentator said, on the wrong side of every issue for 50 years.
Not to mention his lack of character in his personal life which always bothered me. When his wife was killed in an auto accident he made up the story it wasn't her fault, but it was. She unfortunately drove into the oncoming traffic and almost killed the man who hit her, since his vehicle tumbled over and over, but he got out and came to her assistance. Biden even lied, and claimed he was drinking. He also had to step down from a presidential run in the 1980's because he stole other people's speeches. Obama got it right when he said one should never underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up.
Thank you, Fran, you should re-write the history of the world. But can anyone handle the truth?
I don't think so Kathleen, I get depressed just reading about it every now and again. However, it shouldn't be surprising that it turned out like this given our ancestors, those cute, but often violent chimps, morphed into us.
Fran, I'm not proud of voting for Kamala/Cheney. Voting for either candidate was a very morally compromising thing to do, since they were just 2 aspects of 1 insane military-industrial corporate empire. I voted for Kamala because the left is so divided right now that we have zero revolution ready to roll, and I thought, how dare I DRAFT the most marginalized Americans to be the cannon fodder, the first to suffer (and suffer greatly!) for my half-baked dream revolution? Have you even thought about this?
Also, while ALL American presidents in my 71-year life have been war criminals (part of the job description, don't you know), Trump was different. He had already murdered 400,000 elderly Americans (says The Lancet, world famous journalist Carl Bernstein (who broke the Watergate story and the Mai Lai story), and Trump's own Director of Vaccines, Dr. Tony Bright).
People make the assertion that Trump's mishandling of Covid caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths due to Covid, and even reference it as, he murdered these people. However, let me remind you that there were, and still are hundreds of thousands of deaths in hospitals and nursing homes yearly due to unsanitary conditions, or simply poor care which was in play before the Covid pandemic and after. That was never taken into account. Those Aides who took over the role once implemented by the nursing staff really don't implement decent hygienic care at all. Our health care system is a mess. That's why they suggest if you're going to have a hospital stay, have an advocate. During the Trump years he was blamed for everything, and anything and that's how a riot became an insurrection, and Liz Cheney got her presidential citizens medal from Biden. We can't go back to those years. I use to be a registered democrat and cut loose when the man I supported, Sanders, sang Clinton's praises when she won the democratic primary in 2016, a war monger who supported all our Middle Eastern wars and laughed when she heard Gaddafi died, and died because of the lies the democrats, and Clinton provided.
Well, that's just how "party loyalty" works, you support the new leader, even though Sanders knew the DNC was rigged against him since they never bothered to finish the CA primary vote. The joke of a constitution only (barely) functions when participants are people with good intent. That is so over.
Absolutely right. At the time I would occasionally watch MSNBC and they referenced him as the old curmudgeon, and they work hand and glove with the democratic party, so they know it wanted a Clinton win. You hope against hope.
Fran, there is no point in trying to get through to a Trumper. Taiwan and Florida have the same size population: 23M. In rowboat distance from China, Taiwan had zero time to prepare for Covid. America had 2 months to prepare. Trump's criminal negligence during that time resulted, in Florida alone, in 24,000 Covid deaths during his term. In Taiwan, which had plenty of PPE and almost instantly had rolled out fast testing, which allowed contact tracing (do you know what that is?), there was little societal disruption and only 7 deaths during Trump's term. Ever heard of The Lancet (the world's most respected medical journal)?? Bye Karen.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/02/11/trumps-policies-resulted-in-the-unnecessary-deaths-of-hundreds-of-thousands-of-americans-lancet-report/
How does anyone evaluate his performance during the Covid pandemic, or anything else when the mainstream media lost all sense of objectivity during his presidency as did the left. The riot at the Capital became an insurrection, instead of a riot, which it was, and of course there was the lie of Russia-gate, but it was predicated on a lie, but no one was held accountable. How can you trust the media to evaluate his performance during the Covid pandemic when they were willing to lie and distort truth every which way they could when it came to Trump. I don't know whether I addressed you yesterday on this issue and wrote about our health care system, so maybe this is a repeat. Do you know, or are aware of the fact that some hundred thousand people who enter hospitals die every year due to infections? Infections that kill more people every year then auto-accidents, and Aids and breast cancer, etc. combined. Do you know why? Bad hygiene! Multiply all that a number of times when one is talking about nursing homes. Poor hygiene is the main reason that makes the elderly much more likely to contract pneumonia and die. Bedsores kill them, sepsis kills them. Poor hygiene is a matter of course. How do you evaluate how many people died of Covid under Trump's watch when what it did was just add fuel to the fire.
Trump SHOULD be blamed for everything because he was the captain of a ship who PURPOSELY navigated into a shipwreck. You heard the tape of him telling famous journalist Bob Woodward that he knew Covid was an airborne plague, yet he did nothing for the crucial first 2 months. Taiwan had 7 deaths during Trump's presidency while Florida, with the same population had 24,000. I will not discuss this with someone who is ignorant of the basic concept of the scientific method. Read the truth in The Lancet, the most respected medical journal in the world: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/02/11/trumps-policies-resulted-in-the-unnecessary-deaths-of-hundreds-of-thousands-of-americans-lancet-report/
I finally read your highly touted article and to me it's representative of the attitude adopted by many which is, let's use Trump as a scapegoat and what ever goes wrong it's his fault. How about some outrage that this was a lab leak and many scientists are against gain of function research for just that reason. I'm sure there's plenty of blame to go around, but lets not continue to use Trump as our whipping boy. Remember the Lancet, and true of other scientific publications. can become highly political which often skews the truth.
Your moral qualms do not matter. Your vote counts exactly the same as every other vote.
You voted for genocide. Own it.
This is turning idiotic. I never said a good word about Biden. He is a war criminal for re Israel and Ukraine and should be convicted of treason and shot before a firing squad. I merely told you a scientific truth you can read in The Lancet: that Trump basically murdered 400,000 elderly Americans via horrible tragic deaths, often dying alone. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/02/11/trumps-policies-resulted-in-the-unnecessary-deaths-of-hundreds-of-thousands-of-americans-lancet-report/
The most respected medical journal in the world, but science is inconvenient for you.
Hardly, since my background is in the biological sciences and I also have a degree in nursing.. My mother who was paralyzed from a stoke had to go into a nursing home and I was with her most days for several years until her death. So I have quite a bit of hands on experience on this topic as well, Believe what you want, and yes Trump through his four years in office and during the pandemic was scapegoated by the democrats. I don't care what the Lancet says. Why harp on this Jeff. I am not telling you what your perspective should be just disagreeing with it.
The suffering people you (and the D party elite) so cavalierly dismiss as "idiots," the majority working class, were abandoned after the neolib takeover of the D party. Four decades of not so benign neglect.
We dumb blue collar workers are well aware the Ds did FOR the suffering unemployed workers of the Rust Belt/Appalachia same as they did TO the Wall St. vultures who caused the '08 crash--NOTHING! Same area that not coincidentally now leads in what are called 'deaths of despair." But who cares about these losers, right?
Rather than use a meaningless generalization as simply another condemnation, how about asking WHY people are, say, right wing evangelicals? If there is no chance for decent employment, then TV preachers offering the Gospel of Prosperity start to sound good. If there is no security or meaning in this life, then the only thing left is to aim for the next life. Politicians who align with those slim hopes at least are offering something.
When 65% of Americans have less than $5k savings, 48% have less than $1k, and 28% have no savings at all, then any unanticipated problem easily becomes disaster in just a few weeks. Climate crises, the breakdown of American empire, and terminal capitalism in comparison are abstract, huge, and overwhelming to people already at their limits of anxiety and depression.
S U P E R B comment RS.
‘Christian fascism’ is merely a form of authoritarianism whose adherents channel the simple good/bad rules-based ethos of Christianity - the Ten Commandments in particular - without embracing the religion as a whole. Anyone can do it. Immediately.
So to say some of its adherents are ‘not very Christian’ is to completely miss the point.
We talk, talk about Christianity in regard to this issue but not a word about Judaism, and it's beliefs that for too many justify this carnage in Gaza?
Actually, the Zionists completely ignore the beliefs of Judaism. They don't obey the laws of the Torah.
Many Conservative rabbis have spoken out against the dominant politics of Israel/ZION.
I was lucky to have a good friend who was Jewish to explain Judaism to me. Please find a practicing Jew to explain it to you.
It's nothing like what's happening in Palestine.
True. Zionism, both Cristian and Jewish, betrays the essence of their religion and is fascist like the Catholic faith in the middle ages.
I should have qualified that, you're right, but growing up in a state with many Jews and having Jewish friends all my life, I don't need a lecture from you that suggests my statement reflected an underlying prejudice Gee, only 1 good Jewish friend?
Christian dominionists and Zionists walk hand in hand - particularly when it comes to the ‘true believers’ (rather than the rank and file cynics in these movements.) The Dominionists believe that the unification of Israel will usher in the 2nd coming and then the rapture - and have been working for three generations to bring this about.
Those would be the ‘Jewish fascists’, Zionists or not. There are certainly plenty of them around only it’s a little tricky at the moment for anyone of note to refer to them publicly in such terms.
But that only confirms the fascist nature of their ideology.
"But that only confirms the fascist nature of their ideology."
I can understand that there are those of fascist bent among any population, but I didn't quite track that last part, David.
Which ideology? Judaism as a whole?
Like Christianity and Islam Judaism is not a homologous congregation. Amongst its members - especially in Israel - there are those for whom authority and the qualities that flow from it - oppression of minorities, exceptionalism, mythology, sense of being disrespected (antisemitism), propaganda over truthfulness, cultishness etc - is the essence and must be pushed for their own sake. A special liturgy and ideology of aggression is developed which the leaders assert and to which the followers submit. This then sucks in anyone who is there just to ‘kick ass ‘ which here means those Christians - real or feigned - who create a narrative to justify their allegiance (Second Coming).
As I see it there are effectively two Gods; the one that naturally transcends all consciousness and the one that Man created to ‘bless’ his dominion over everything. The religious fascists - of all denominations - are in the second category.
And they are on the rampage.
Thank you for clarifying, David.
I am trying to sort out in my mind (and limited understanding) where the Haredim would fit in terms of your schema of the two Gods. By the tenets of their sect, and their lifestyle (and in being anti-Zionist), they would seem to be devoted to the transcendent God. And yet in their actions they seem to be strongly in the second category. A type of selective renunciation of the world(?).
There was a Chabad House near my rooming house near the University of Washington, back in 1970s. I always admired their devotion. (The lights were always burning, from their studying.) It's disappointing to see their actions in the West Bank.
Sociopaths care little for religion or belief of any sort, except as a tool to be used when convenient.
the ones who actually believe scare me more, because they believe that they will be raptured in a nuclear armageddon.
The decisionmakers believe no such thing, otherwise they would not be frantically trying to get their mitts on as many of the goodies as possible.
You're so right. I'm afraid there are no real Christians among any listed above. And Christian Fascism is a complete perversion of what Jesus Christ taught. "Christian" fascism is a political ideological sect as you say, not a religion. We only have to read the Beatitudes to know what is Christian and what is not. As soon as a political power structure takes over a religion, religion - as in the carrier of the sacred, or we might say of the Good, the True and the Beautiful - is completely twisted and adulterated. Christian Nationalism or Christian Fascism could more Rightly be called the Antichrist.
"To me, faith is not just a noun, but also a verb." From “Living Faith” by Jimmy Carter, 1996
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Yes, thank you for bringing that in - the more active form (verb) as in living our faith. As a noun it's sometimes more about holding beliefs, having faith in something or someone.
It seems to me that all of them in Trump’s circle are “Christians” in the pretend sense. But that holds true for all the “Christians” in the country that support fascism. They are fascists first and foremost and use their “Christianity” to rally around. From that standpoint Hedge’s correctly refers to all of them as “Christians.”
You forgot to mention the Kushner crime family. Son-in-law Jared prepared the way for Netanyahu and Biden's genocide by initiating the Abraham Accords to tie the other Arab countries hands and keep them from interfering as the genocide progressed. So now ex-con Daddy Charles Kushner is rewarded with a cushy prestigious post as Ambassador to France.
The New American Kleptocracy!
Right!
Because I read Hedges' "When Atheism Becomes Religion," I agree with you that these particular figures don't necessarily represent any mainstream religion but the most cultish, radical, Utopian and psycho expressions of religion which can also be expressed existentially. Case in point is the totalitarian "religion of salvation" of scientism which late French political philosopher Tzvetan Todolov describes in "Hope and Memory":
"Totalitarian doctrines are instances of utopianism (the only known instances in the 20th century) and, by the same tolken, variants of millenarism— and that means that they belong, as do all doctrines of salvation, to the field of religion… All the same, the origins of totalitarian utopianism are quite paradoxical for a religion. They lie in a doctrine that was developed before the rise of totalitarian states, before the twentieth century, and which seems at first glance to have absolutely nothing on common with religion. We must turn now to this earlier ideology, which we shall call 'scientism.'
Scientism as a doctrine starts with the hypothesis that the real world is an entirely coherent structure. It follows that the world is transparent, that it can be known entirely and without residue by the human mind. The task of acquiring such knowledge is delegated to the requisite praxis, called science. The basic postulate has one obvious consequence … [I]f the transparency of the real includes the human world, then there is nothing to stop us from imagining how to create the “new man,” a human species without the blemishes of the original strain. The logic of livestock breeding ought to work for humankind as well…
The notion that social and individual ideals are the products of science has another important consequence… There is no room for more than one version of scientific truth; errors are many but the truth is one, and so pluralism becomes an irrelevant concept. If the ideal is a result of demonstration and not of opinion, then it has to be accepted without protest.
Scientism derives from the existence of scientific practice, but it is not itself scientific. It’s basic postulate—the complete transparency of the real—cannot be proved; the same is true of its implementation through the construction of ultimate ends through the process of knowledge. From start to finish, the cult of science requires an act of faith (“faith in reason,” in Ernest Renan’s phrase), which is why it belongs not to the family of sciences, but to the family of religions…
It has to be emphasized that scientism is not a science, but a world view that grew, fungus-like, on the trunk of science. That is why totalitarian systems can embrace the cult of science and still not foster the development of scientific research…
The monism of totalitarian regimes comes from the same axiom of the cult of science. Because there is only one rational way of grasping the entire universe, there is no reason to maintain artificial distinctions between different social groups, between the different spheres of individual life (public and private), and between opinions. Truth is one and so should the human world be. "
I've not read this book by Mr Hedges.
Thank you for posting this.
In particular, this section:
"Scientism derives from the existence of scientific practice, but it is not itself scientific. It’s basic postulate—the complete transparency of the real—cannot be proved; the same is true of its implementation through the construction of ultimate ends through the process of knowledge. From start to finish, the cult of science requires an act of faith (“faith in reason,” in Ernest Renan’s phrase), which is why it belongs not to the family of sciences, but to the family of religions…"
........
It reflects something that I have carried in mind for many years, the thought that legitimation of what he terms scientism rests upon an assumption, and is an act of (blind) faith on the same order as that of religion. This being the very criticism that scientism uses to assert it's distinction from them and it's sole legitimacy.
And this never seems to be questioned.
Perhaps discussed elsewhere, but it is the first time I have seen it.
Sorry for the typo-- the quote is from Tzvetan Todorov (not Todolov).
I first learned of Todorov because Hedges' cites his work in When Atheism Becomes Religion. Hedges also quotes Reinhold Niebuhr, another rabbit hole that I followed. I don't necessarily agree with everything written by Niebuhr (apparently the original author of the Serenity Prayer) but he gives a clear warning in The Irony of American History and in The Children of Darkness and the Children of Light. He argues that, when the state and science attempt to answer the human need for transcendence, this invariably leads to the use of power without scruples under an illusion that a particular “conception of an unambiguously ideal end” justifies such abuse: “As politics deals with the proximate ends of life, and religion deals with ultimate ones, it is always a source of illusion when the one is invested with the other…This unification is spurious and dangerous; but this in fact adds to, rather than detracts from, its striking power. Religion and science are combined in such a way that the modern cult of science is brought completely into the service of an existential faith.”
The root theory in totalitarian scientism is arguably the existence of a morally transcendant master race which, on the flipside, naturally requires a kind of morally inferior devil class for contrast. Hannah Arendt also warns about scientism in Totalitarianism, particularly her reference to the core totalitarian concept of the "objective enemy"-- one you don't even need to observe committing any offense much less trying and convicting them because they are, in a sense, "born evil."
If you like a good scare, check out the MacArthur Foundation's Law and Neuroscience project which has been accused of trying to launch a Minority Report style campaign to find the "crime gene." If you go down that particular rabbit hole, some of the research promoted by the project is founded on a terrifying collection of old timey racist theories.
Karl Popper also gets into it in The Open Society and its Enemies regarding Plato's weird Pythagorean theorem supporting the existence of a mater race.
Reading that, I think there is possible way of considering the theory of totalitarian scientism, the MacArthur Foundation project, and Plato's theorem (as described by Propper) above: a sort of root of the root view.
Humans putatively have a capacity for abstract thought that distinguishes us. And we see this ideational capacity this "world of the mind" as existing both above and distinct from the more "primitive" or animal aspects of our nature. We have a high regard for our distinct ability to "reason".
But if we look at the world, it would seem more likely that the abstract thoughts come after the fact of our emotions, the "primitive" foundations of mind.
Leaving aside the problematic and probably unanswerable question of the origins of consciousness, and the nature of the interrelationship of mind and brain, we can limit it to looking at our behavior, and hold certain considerations up against what we see (in history and in the world).
We can hold up the possibility that "us versus them" is a foundational structure that underlies, and shapes our abstract ideations and all that follow (respective to the religious, scientific or philosophical question).
No matter how apparently brilliant the thoughts (by the measure of complexity, subtlety and insight), Platonic theories, science-based study of genetic dispositions, philosophical and religious development of ideas, all ultimately rest upon and are shaped by the pre-verbal levels of mind, and come after the fact, and the ends of these processes reflecting them.
And those pre-verbal levels are in many ways murderous.
I think you're right that humans are primitively prone to analogize everything to the threat of infectious disease, the ultimate unseen enemy. According to Noam Chomsky, there's nothing more dangerous than comparing political problems and ideological enemies to disease. He felt that, in Kissinger’s analysis, a politically contagious threat is the development of independent nationalism in other countries that somehow presents either ideological or economic competition—or anything else that stands in the way of, as Dr. Chomsky also put it, “securing state power from the domestic population and securing concentrated private power”:
"To borrow Henry Kissinger’s terminology, independent nationalism is a 'virus' that might 'spread contagion.' Kissinger was referring to Salvador Allende’s Chile. The virus was the idea that there might be a parliamentary path towards some kind of socialist democracy. The way to deal with such a threat is to destroy the virus and to inoculate those who might be infected, typically by imposing murderous national security states. That was achieved in the case of Chile, but it is important to recognize that the thinking holds worldwide."
"It was, for example, the reasoning behind the decision to oppose Vietnamese nationalism in the early 1950s and support France’s effort to reconquer its former colony. It was feared that independent Vietnamese nationalism might be a virus that would spread contagion to the surrounding regions, including resource-rich Indonesia. That might even have led Japan — called the 'superdomino' by Asia scholar John Dower — to become the industrial and commercial center of an independent new order of the kind imperial Japan had so recently fought to establish. That, in turn, would have meant that the U.S. had lost the Pacific war, not an option to be considered in 1950. The remedy was clear — and largely achieved. Vietnam was virtually destroyed and ringed by military dictatorships that kept the “virus” from spreading contagion."
Hedges also alludes to a kind of "viral" analogy in Richard Dawkins' "scientism-y" concept of memetic evolution. Maybe because the idea harks to the debunked Lamarckian evolutionary theory that acquired traits are genetic, Sam Harris opined that it's not unreasonable to kill people because of their beliefs alone. For that matter, maybe he'd think it was also acceptable to kill their children in the case these ideas are "inherited" like RNA viruses.
I think that we are prone to seeing everything in terms of certain fundamental underlying structures, or themes, that are at their basis absolutely "primitive". I see genetic influence is itself as having a metaphorical element. (And in many applications, perhaps best left there.) I think that genetics is clearly an undeniable reality, but it is problematic when it is carried to the point that is seen as teleological and even deterministic (as is often done).
I would put it in terms of human dispositions and tendencies, leaving aside the question of a materialist aspect of mind. (Again the relationship between brain and mind, and the nature of consciousness has never been satisfactorily explained, in any discipline.)
With respect to what you write, I would say that the the innate fear of invasive disease, a form of "other", infection, is one of the primary structures (like us and them) upon which our mental activities are built.
It's potency both infects the thoughts of someone like Kissinger (who I'm sure accepted it as face value) and also in combination with "us and them" also had an incredibly effective manipulative power within the context of the political situation of that time, as used by him. The key aspect here is the fact that this process, the structuring of the idea and the influence on the thought of Kissinger and those who are influenced by his ideas is totally unconscious. The don't themselves see the root, but accept that the perception it shapes is reality.
Perhaps this disposition is in fact genetic, but I think that we enter into fraught territory when genetics is viewed to any degree of determinism - it enters into the area that Niebuhr and Chris Hedges discuss in the passage you cited, particularly when taken to the extremes of Harris, Dawkins, the Nazis, the American history of eugenics.
I believe the Cristian right is not very Christian either and our congress is full of those devils.
In reply to Robert M,
It is blindingly obvious that Trump et al are "not very Christian" even if, like the Curate's egg, they think they are "good in parts". The fact that they do think they are, is, I think, Chris's point. He is clearly writing with deep irony, which may be missed in some quarters - but this is a side issue.
The main point is that Perfection is, after all, not a human characteristic. Despite Trump’s brilliant example, you simply can't be perfectly stupid, clueless, dishonest, or generally crooked. The reason is that you will slip up by accident now and then and say or do things that are not perfectly stupid, clueless, dishonest or generally crooked. Such is the frailty of human nature. Bad people occasionally do good and kindly things by mistake!
It is therefore clear that the appropriate term for all such "Christian" hangers-on is: "Pseudo-Christian". Thus Chris ought to have begun by saying, "The billionaires, Pseudo-Christian fascists, grifters..." etc. and then we would all know what page we are on. Ditto the name of his book.
America has from its inception been a home to umpteen forms of Pseudo-Christianity. It is perhaps the world-leader in a field that ought to be more formally known as, "Pseudo-Christian Fascist Materialism". In what other country can the acquisition of extreme wealth, by fair means or foul, be seen as a form of “Christian” sanctity, or at least a deeply blessèd form of morally superior wisdom, particularly bestowed on those who spell God with an L, as in the case of Joseph Heller’s Major Major Major Major’s father.
Thank you for the Curate's egg. An expression I wasn't familiar with.
And for the mention of anything by Heller. Still tracking down, though, the reference to God spelled with an L (decades have passed since reading the book).
In the process so far, though, I did find this wonderful section, I'd also forgotten this one, and it was nice to read again. And how many of the same currents have been running through this country in contention for nearly a century now?
Has anyone come close to Heller again, in anything close to this vein, particularly recently?
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1375767-major-major-s-father-was-a-sober-god-fearing-man-whose-idea
Bannon does?
Chris, do you have any thoughts on the chance of some areas of the country breaking away and going it alone?
Won't happen, as long the United States is more useful to the ruling classes as a going concern.
Yes, what's going on in Washington now looks a lot like the oligarchs tearing up the corpse of our country. I don't think we broke in 2003. I think we broke when the Supreme Court stepped in illegally, stopped the count, and handed the presidency to Bush. Remember those secret energy meetings that VP Cheney was having in Spring 2001? Turns out they were dividing up the energy fields of Iraq. The invasion was already in pre-production.
If Elon Must is supposed to be looking for waste, why isn't he trolling the budget of the Pentagon, which famously "loses" trillions of dollars at a time? Probably not brave enough, is my thought.
When empires collapse, their provinces break up and become states. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed after World War One, the British Empire, the German Empire, the Soviet Union, their pieces broke off.
The United states has one saving grace that these other empires didn't have. We are not run from the top down. We are run from the bottom up. Government begins with towns, cities, then counties, then states. If the Federal Government ceases to function, the state government will still be intact. It is self-funded.
This is all very well for states that send more tax dollars to the Fed than receive them. Those will be self-sustaining. States that need huge doles from the Fed to stay afloat -- here's looking at you, all you red states in the middle -- will fall.
At that point, California will take its place as the 6th largest world economy. Our state government will be intact. And the California National Party already has a plan. If you would like to read an example of what government should look like in the 21st century, check out the platform of the California National Party. https://votecnp.org/platform-2022/.
"It is not necessary to hope, to persevere."
"We are not run from the top down. We are run from the bottom up. Government begins with towns, cities, then counties, then states. If the Federal Government ceases to function, the state government will still be intact."
This has echoes of deTocqueville, but I wonder though, how true this is today.
I honestly don't know either way.
Hopefully it is still the case, at least in the majority of states.
But the realities of seceding from the union...I think that would be a hugely difficult and fraught endeavor. For all of the anti-government talk, the current scenario is one of greater concentration of power, centered on the federal level and in the office held by Donald Trump. It's difficult to envision the Right giving up the prize that they finally seem to have won completely. It would seem that they would be particularly reluctant to lose those states that provide the most federal tax revenue, regardless of the red/blue proportion within those states. And even the bluest contain a red population.
But...in the scenario of a more than likely national economic catastrophe, things could change in ways that are hard to imagine now. I think it is possible.
I am not envisioning a secession movement. I am envisioning the US collapsing (what if Elon Musk has just converted the US Treasury to DOGE coins, his NFT? After all, that's what he called his extra-legal onslaught on the Federal Government), and the states becoming countries because D.C. is no longer capable of controlling anything. I'm envisioning that CA will just step off. No one wants a repeat of the Civil War.
We were typing at the same time.
I was editing that first to add that very thing as you were typing. I think that might qualify as an instance of synchronicity.
.....
I didn't get a lot of information from the website, a new organization, the specifics still forming. But I think that it does point to something that is a very, very good idea. Organizations formed specifically to deal with the scenario of the coming troubles. The political equivalent of the disaster plans by the Oregon and Washington state governments to prepare for the Pacific Subduction earthquake.
Organizations from grass-roots to state level to prepare for the likelihood of federal political and economic disaster. Formal organizational structures, particularly on a state level, developed and ready to step in and re-establish function in the setting of federal failure.
The prospect of this possibility makes me more hopeful. Thank you.
I think that one factor that distinguishes the scenario of the U.S. empire from the others you mentioned is that big part of the break-up of the Ottoman, Habsburg and the British empires was coming bottom up from the nationalistic drives within those parts of the empire along the lines ethnic nationalism, the desire for a state defined by and for those groups, the nation-state. A drive starting in the 19th century. A similar nationalistic fervor plays a part in what is happening here, but I think that it plays in a slightly different way, one closer to the Volkisch movement. But in terms of over-all effect, I think that it could be nearly equally de-stabilizing, still leading to fault lines.
I believe that those nationalistic longings were always there, but a strong central government keeps them in check. See how Yugoslavia broke up after Tito.
Yes, which recalls one of the ironies of empires: historically they sometimes succeeded in terms enjoying long periods of peace and stability within, and the differences of ethnicity and religion were tolerated much more readily than in other eras. A trade-off.
Been following you for many years and appreciate your analysis. As you continue your reporting will you be able to suggest ways common citizens in this country might readjust their lifestyle in order to take care of their families or will a decent life for us be unattainable?
Chris Hedges is not for the faint-hearted. If only more people had stronger hearts....
Agreed. As I replied to a comment by you previously, those I attempted to share his work with attacked him (and me for sharing his work) but never once mentioned where he specifically "got it wrong" . . . and now here WE are. Faint-hearted, Blue Kool-Aid-aholics, intentionally dismissive of what they do not want to look at - this is why we have Orange idiot.
"The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg ruler, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities."
Caligula and Nero were part of the first Roman imperial dynasty, the Juilo-Claudian dynasty. The Western Empire was just getting started and had another 400 or so years to run when Caligula and Nero were up and about.
Moreover, if Team R were as lockstep as you claim, why the difficulties in getting confirmations? They control both houses of Congress, so confirming a Gabbard or a Patel should be as simple as "here's your marching orders, now start marching!"
Excellent as always! Yesterday unloading books from sagging bookshelves, I discovered "The Rise & Fall of the Roman Empire" published by National Geographic. I'm looking forward to comparing the inept leadership in our declining empire vs. theirs. There will no doubt be many similarities.
You might check out Mike Duncan's History of Rome, a free podcast, which he then published as a book. He's a great scholar, and a terrific story-teller.
That's what I love about Chris, always looking on the bright side! I'm sure we all needed that heavy dose of downers. Thanks so much.
Until the shtf, which apparently, from this article, is 2030, let us do everything we can to slow it down, and maybe get lucky, and bring the destruction to a halt. If we don't think we can, that is a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is exactly the opposite of what we need.
But we have to get active; do more than read and agree, or disagree. If you can't be in the streets, then send your letters, emails, fill out forms, speak out in person, and in comments, such as this one, send money to organizations doing the work of spreading the word, and saving lives, counter the MSM messaging, start, and sign petitions. The list goes on. It really is up to us.
Wait, Chris should focus on the bright side of our new administration tearing up the US Constitution while dismantling our federal apparatus of state? Are there dance moves that go with that song? The shtf already, 2030 is the final curtain call.
I do agree that those of us who don't like what we see should take action, and most of all, we should join with others and take collective action. Also, you left out "boycott." :)
(Edited to correct typo "what" > "that")
Once we drop the pious lies and polite pretenses, it becomes harder to defend the existing system.
I am not a Marxist-Leninist, but V.I. Lenin had a point, here.
Brilliant, Chris. 🎯
A great article! Twenty seven years for the implosion of the US empire is too long for me. Who knows, I may live long enough to see it...
According to McCoy who Hedges references, the 27 year time span started in 2003. So according to the math, it will collapse in 2030. Unless you are in the last few years of your life, you will indeed be around to see it. That is unless nuclear weapons are unleashed upon the earth, climate change gets us, or an economic collapse, or a combination of all of them kills off millions or billions before 2030. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut: And so it goes.
I am hoping, wishing, praying for a giant meteor to deliver a direct hit to put us out of our misery = end of shit-show.
No need for giant meteor. Nuclear annihilation is approaching.
I know the nuclear option is upon us but was hoping for a quick solution with the giant meteor strike. Either way, it ain't lookin' good Julio.
I've been hoping the space aliens might take pity on us and save us from ourselves. Plus, Elvis is with them.
Amen!
It is so surreal watching from Canada that there is no resistance to Elon Musk executing a coup with no opposition whatsoever. He's got personal and financial information on every American, American industries as well as nuclear contracts, details and probably much, much, more. This article is great in articulating that the US, in terms of empire, is rather pedestrian than exceptional - which, as Canadians, we always suspected. ;-)